Updated 11:12 am, Tuesday, March 21, 2017

A former Tukwila police officer who doused a man strapped to a gurney with pepper spray now complains that federal prosecutors are “piling on.”

A former Tukwila police officer who doused a man strapped to a...

A former Tukwila police officer who doused a man strapped to a gurney with pepper spray now complains that federal prosecutors are “piling on.”

Nicholas Hogan’s defense attorney claims he has been too harshly treated for abusing an arrestee. Hogan lost not one but two police jobs – he was hired by the city of Snoqualmie’s department after being forced out of Tukwila’s – only to be sentenced Tuesday to nine months in jail for a civil rights violation.

“The defense can only ask, ‘For what purpose?’” defense attorney Wayne Fricke asked rhetorically in a memo to U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who sentenced Hogan.

“Indeed what can possibly be the reason to penalize Mr. Hogan for long ago conduct three separate times? … Mr. Hogan has suffered enough and any incarceration/prohibitions simply amounts to ‘piling on.’”

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Hogan’s suffering, though, doesn’t compare well to the suffering he inflicted on an arrestee on May 21, 2011.

That day, Hogan sprayed pepper spray on a man who was strapped to a hospital gurney at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. The man was unable to wipe his own face, and Hogan refused to help him. Confronted by hospital staff, Hogan whined that the arrestee was “mouthy.”

Minutes before the pepper spraying, Hogan had kneed the arrested man in the head repeatedly after he refused to leave Hogan’s patrol car. Prosecutors say Hogan kneeled on the man’s back once inside the hospital and demanded that someone “get a gurney for this (expletive) monkey.”

Hogan, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Miyake said in court papers, “both abused his authority and victimized a restrained person in his custody.” Beyond the immediate harm, Miyake said, Hogan undermined the public trust placed in police.

“If the community cannot rely upon police officers to obey the law, the community will lose faith in the very institutions designed to protect it,” said Miyake, who prosecuted the matter alongside attorneys from the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

On Tuesday Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with leaders of civil rights organizations who are resisting the Justice Department's movement on a number of issues. Police reform, voting rights, immigration crackdowns, and reported spikes in hate crimes were a few of the issues at hand.
The closed-door meeting was the culmination of attempts by both sides to begin a dialogue on some of the most divisive stances taken by the Trump administration.

Media: WochIt Media

The prosecution asked that Hogan be sentenced to a year in jail. Hogan’s attorneys argue that no jail sentence is necessary.

Hogan left the Tukwila Police Department months after the incident only to be hired on in 2014 by the Snoqualmie Police Department.

Indicted in May, Hogan previously pleaded guilty to a “color of law” violation, admitting that he used his position as a police officer to deprive another person of their civil rights. As part of the plea agreement Hogan will not be allowed to work as an armed police officer for 15 years.

Court records show Hogan was the focus of at least two lawsuits against the Tukwila department related to 2011 incidents.

In one, the city paid a $100,000 settlement to a man who claimed Hogan broke his elbow during a violent, unnecessary arrest. The settlement related to a claimed public disclosure violation on part of the city.

The second stemmed from claims that Hogan remarked “this one isn’t going to play basketball anymore” after a black man he was arresting suffered a broken ankle. Peter Mullenix, one of the attorneys representing the injured man, said the city settled the matter for $175,000.

Miyake said that Hogan’s history showed a pattern of excessive force that extended through his time at the Snoqualmie department.

Fricke, the defense attorney, said Hogan has denied claims that he called the arrested man a “monkey” and claimed that the allegations surfaced years after the incident once federal investigators became involved.

Hogan, Fricke argued, is being unfairly judged for conduct now five years past.

“Mr. Hogan was a better officer five years after the occurrence which brings us here today and the community is the one that has suffered because of the late filing of this indictment,” Fricke said in a statement to the court. “There is no need for additional punishment.

“The government got what it wanted, which was to remove an officer from the street based on his past and not on the person he is in the present.”

Hogan was sentenced at the U.S. District Court in Seattle. He has not been jailed in the matter.